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    Reassessing the Chesterbelloc
    Reassessing the Chesterbelloc
    Reassessing the Chesterbelloc
    Ebook59 pages40 minutes

    Reassessing the Chesterbelloc

    By Jon Elsby

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    Hilaire Belloc and G. K. Chesterton were two of the biggest names on the Georgian literary scene. They were what today would be called 'public intellectuals'. Each wrote nearly a hundred books in a variety of genres and on a huge range of subjects. But they are now almost entirely unread. The author argues that it is time to reassess their achievement. He maintains that, while their work is uneven and some of it is frankly ephemeral, their best work deserves to be rediscovered and read without bias. They will then be seen as writers who offered a robust critique of modernity, and thereby have provided us with resources with which to question and challenge the facile ideas, ingrained prejudices, and lazy assumptions of the ambient culture.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherCentreHouse Press
    Release dateJan 31, 2016
    ISBN9781310723612
    Reassessing the Chesterbelloc
    Author

    Jon Elsby

    Jon Elsby’s spiritual and intellectual journey has been from Protestantism to atheism, and finally to Catholicism. He writes extensively on Catholic literature and Catholic literary figures.

    Read more from Jon Elsby

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      Book preview

      Reassessing the Chesterbelloc - Jon Elsby

      Reassessing the Chesterbelloc

      Jon Elsby

      Jon Elsby has asserted his rights under the Copyright and Patents Act 1988, to be identified as the author of this work. Published by CentreHouse Press at Smashwords.

      Hilaire Belloc and G. K. Chesterton were two of the biggest names on the Georgian literary scene. They were what today would be called ‘public intellectuals’. Each wrote nearly a hundred books in a variety of genres and on a huge range of subjects. But they are now almost entirely unread.

      The author argues that it is time to reassess their achievement. He maintains that, while their work is uneven and some of it is frankly ephemeral, their best work deserves to be rediscovered and read without bias. They will then be seen as writers who offered a robust critique of modernity, and thereby have provided us with resources with which to question and challenge the facile ideas, ingrained prejudices, and lazy assumptions of the ambient culture.

      Contents

      Hilaire Belloc: Reputation and Reappraisal

      •All Human Conflicts are Ultimately Theological

      •The Faith is Not a Theory or an Abstraction, But a Thing, a Concrete Reality, Which is Embodied in the Catholic Church

      •Any Culture is Based on, and Underpinned by, its Religion

      •Truth, Beauty and Goodness Form an Indissoluble Logical Trinity of Absolutes Such That an Attack on (or the Abandonment of) One of Them Would Lead Ineluctably to an Attack on (or Abandonment of) the Others

      G. K. Chesterton: God’s Jester

      •Introduction

      •Chesterton’s Apologetics

      •What Kind of Thinker Was Chesterton?

      •What is Chesterton’s Achievement?

      •Notes

      About the Author

      About CentreHouse Press

      Hilaire Belloc: Reputation and Reappraisal

      Few writers can have suffered such a drastic reversal of fortune as Hilaire Belloc. In his day, he was regarded as one of the greatest living writers, an exemplary stylist, an important thinker and a public intellectual. Yet, by the time of his death in 1953, he was regarded as passé and now he has almost entirely slipped from view. His hundred or so books are largely unread and out of print and, with a couple of exceptions, seem likely to remain so for the foreseeable future. The exceptions, The Path to Rome and the Cautionary Verses he wrote for children and for the few adults with a sufficiently cultivated sense of irony to appreciate them, continue to be read, though not widely.

      The reasons usually given for Belloc’s comparative neglect are numerous. First, it is said that the discursive, conversational essay, the form in which he typically expressed his views, has fallen from fashion. Indeed, the fashion today is for extreme brevity, for ‘getting to the point’ with the minimum of delay. Belloc, following the English tradition of Addison, Steele, Johnson, Lamb and Hazlitt, wrote a leisurely prose, which took its time in coming to the point, and used rhetorical devices such as irony, imagery, illustration and repetition to confirm and elaborate his theses. Second, persistent accusations of anti-Semitism have damaged his reputation. (We shall examine later the question whether – and, if so, to what extent – those accusations may be justified.) Third, Belloc’s characteristic brand of uncompromising, pre-conciliar Catholicism, trenchantly expressed, and the panache, pugnacity and provocativeness with which he defended it, are unpopular, even embarrassing, in an age of ecumenism and inter-faith dialogue. Catholics today are more concerned to extend olive branches to other Christians and those of other faiths than with precise definitions of doctrines or the vigorous defence of their own beliefs. Fourth, his temper and cast of mind – classical, sceptical, fastidious, subtle, mercurial, ironic – is uncongenial to the modern age and is not generally understood. An age such as ours, accustomed to crudity of expression and sledgehammer sarcasm, is not likely to appreciate delicacy, a discriminating choice of words, or irony employed as a rapier rather than as a bludgeon.

      It is worth pausing a while to consider these reasons. The underlying assumption is that, however highly he was regarded in his own day, Belloc cannot be regarded as, in any sense, a major writer or a serious thinker in ours. I said that his reputation had suffered more than the usual reversal after his death. The extent of this reversal can be seen by comparing the following assessments, some by his contemporaries, others by more recent commentators. Here, first, is W N Roughead, writing in 1950, three years before Belloc’s death:

      For he is a born writer if ever there was one.

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